8/10, loved the game, but friends saw me playing it.

I am Miley; the overly enthusiastic type of anime protagonist.

My goal is to stalk 6 people who don't really want to join and nag them to join my Comedy Club while they deal with some actual issues. I have a friend called Harriet who I have decided to sign up to my club despite her lack of interesting and her having a part time job because I am more important.

First was Sara; she is the quiet one who I follow about while she deals with her psychological issues; I got her to open up by knowing a lot about mystery novels which I had spent all night reading.

Next was May; she is the cute little one who wants to develop a chest and is dealing with some serious choices about her families future; she decided to resolve them and join my club after I played some video games and stopped being such a NOOB.

Next was my friend Cindy who was following her dream; through a combination of guilt playing and following her she finally gives in and joins me.

My next target was Vivian, the hockey star who gets ill from people bothering her; I continue to bother her until she joins me through Stockholm Syndrome, ironic as she is Swedish.

Tyler was stalking my friend; I give a potentially dangerous stranger my friends number without her permission and use Harriet to effectively trick him into joining. That's okay though, because I am too selfish to care.

Then there is Male Student. He has a name, but you are supposed to talk to his father, hunt down his name through school and then ignore him not wanting to talk to me by threatening his social life until he joins my club.

By doing all of this, I got the good ending.

I made more friends here than in real life.

Take Persona 3/4, remove the heavy story and dungeon crawling gameplay, keep the daily calendar grind/choices and the social links, but add lots of puns to 'em and bam, you've got Cherry Tree High Comedy Club! It's alright, but it feels like there's something missing, like all you get to see is a small part of a much bigger story.

This was a charming little experience! It could be described as Persona 3/4 without the drama and battling, or as a platonic dating sim, if you're into that sort of thing. Expect some routine anime shenanigans, with characters deep enough to be interesting. It's a very lighthearted, easy-going game, but all the characters feel "real" enough to give it sufficient depth.

My first playthrough took about four hours, and my second around two and a half. It's not a long game, but it's full of characters and personality, like a town from Paper Mario: tTYD, you can keep coming back to people for new looks at them. The game emphasizes making friends and being a well-rounded individual, which I think is as good a moral as you could get. I do wish there had been some forewarning about some aspects of the relationship-building dialogues. For example, you can only discuss a topic once with a "target," for the entire playthrough. Of course, this isn't a huge obstacle, and it only makes the game have stronger replay value.

Don't count on much action, or even multiple dialogue options. All of the gameplay focuses on skill-building, time management, and selecting good topics of conversation. This is simply a great game for those looking for solid characters and friendships in a quirky, somewhat-cliche anime setting. If there's a sequel coming out any time soon, as the end of the game implies, I'm very excited for it!

What the ♥♥♥♥ did you just ♥♥♥♥ing say about me, you little Octavia? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Cherry Tree High, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret stand-up comedies and I have over 300 confirmed bursts of laughter. I am trained in gorilla comedy and I’m the top comic in the entire town. You are nothing to me but just another spectator. I will wipe your sadness with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my ♥♥♥♥ing words. You think you can get away with making ♥♥♥♥ jokes to me over the Internet? Think again, ♥♥♥♥er. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of friends across the Japan and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, Octopus. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your Student Council. You’re ♥♥♥♥ing dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can cheer you up in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my single pun. Not only am I extensively trained in goofing off, but I have access to the entire magazine of props of the Comedy Club and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable serious grimace off your face, you little ♥♥♥♥. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” sing-up list was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your ♥♥♥♥ing tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idiot. I will ♥♥♥♥ gags all over you and you will drown in them. Laugh and the world with laugh with you, kiddo.

First off; I am going to say it is like a dating sim, in that you build relationships and meet people.

The game is simple and doesn't try to be anything else, it doesn't shoe-horn in mini games to pass time, it tells a story and introduces you to interesting and funny characters; the more you learn of, the more you discover how deep they all are.

The game can be tough, you play a highschool student and have to maintain homework, limit fatigue and all while also trying to maintain knowledge of various topics to discuss with potential friends and peers.

If you want a visual novel type story with plenty of interaction and decent length of gameplay, pick this game up

+ Free demo!
+ No bugs whatsoever!
+ You can transfer your Repertoire plus Targets' likes and dislikes to the next save file.
+ ...So if you didn't make it the first time, you'll definitely get a good ending with the next playthrough.
+ There is a sequel, which is out now!

+/- 2 hours per playthrough.
+/- Sugary sweet story, very innocent.
+/- Perfect for kids.
+/- In the westernised version, the translation is aimed at Americans who don't (necessarily) know anything about Japanese culture, even though there are shrines and cherry blossoms - but it works nonetheless.
+/- In the westernised version, there are lots of references to (American) pop culture.
+/- Simple art style, quite nice but not eye poppingly awesome.

- Repetitive gameplay.
- Not very original in its genre, both with gameplay and characters.
- 2.5 playthroughs needed for full completion and no way to skip the last week or two (which is annoying if you've finished both your Repertoire and your Target list halfway through April).




(I played it while offline, so Steam didn't register my gaming time. :< )

The goal of CTHCC is to befriend the game's characters well enough to join the school club. If you've played Persona 4, the gameplay of CTHCC tries very hard to be the town segments of that game. You train certain skills to relate to people better, then talk to them as much as possible in order to become friends with them, see their stories, and finally convice them to join. Oddly, you never actually perform any comedy in the game, because it ends on the club registration deadline.

CTHCC is definitely not anywhere near Persona 4, but most games aren't. Unfortunately, this game has the weaknesses of P4's town gameplay as well. It's very repetitive. The music would be decent for this game if it wasn't repeated over and over ad nauseum. But, this game's strength is the character-driven story. While the characters are not near the level of P4, they were better than I expected them to be, though I wish they had more chit-chat dialogue.

This game has some display issues. Alt+Enter is the only way to make it fullscreen, and even then it doesn't work well. The art is decent otherwise, for being 2D still images. CTHCC controls well enough.

CTHCC is an okay way to kill an hour or two, but I was getting bored by the end of my three hour playthrough. I wouldn't pay much for it, though. Wait for a 75% off sale if this sounds interesting to you. If not, you're not missing too much by choosing to skip this game.

Warning: Lengthy review incoming!


Cherry Tree High Comedy Club is an interactive visual novel with the gameplay of a dating simulator.

Before I get into the review, I want you to know, that I played the westernized localization of the game. I’m going to talk about this in a little bit more detail at a later point of this review.

You play as Miley Verisse, a young comedy fanatic, who’s planning on forming her very own Comedy Club in her school. Miley’s roommate has already been compelled to join the club, but the problem is that school clubs have a minimum number of required members, which means that Miley has to find three more people to join her club until the end of the club trial period. That means you’ve got two months to manipulate and befriend as many people as possible.

This is where the dating simulator gameplay comes in.
There are six different characters that can be recruited and you befriend them by talking to them about different topics. You raise your skill levels by reading magazines or visiting places and occasionally you can also find random stuff on the ground that raises your skills as well. The higher your skill for “fashion” for example is, the more the friendship level of a character will be raised when talking to them about this topic.

This type of gameplay can get a bit repetitive, since you do the same thing every day. You get up, talk to a character, talk to another character, watch some TV and the day is over. Repeat until some special event happens or until the friendship level of a character rises.

To get a character to join your club you have to get them to friendship level 5, which is pretty much impossible to do for all 6 characters in the first playthrough. Fortunately there is a new game+, which allows you to keep all your skills and only resets your friendship levels.

The whole game has a lot of jokes, because, you know… Miley’s a comedy enthusiast and stuff.
There were some jokes that are right up my alley that I found really amusing and then there were some others that just fell flat for me.

The characters are rather diverse and even though some of them seem pretty spineless in the beginning, you find out that they have a really interesting background story after befriending them. On the other hand, there are also some characters that still seem rather spineless after you convince them to join your club and their background story is by far not as interesting as you’d expect.

A big problem I had with the game is, that it only supports a resolution of 640x480 and if you want to play it in fullscreen mode, the game window gets stretched to fit the height of your screen and you get two beautiful black bars next to the game to fill your screen. The settings of the game are also pretty limited, but hey, it’s a visual novel and not some fancy AAA game title, so I guess that’s expectable.

At the time I bought this game, no original version was available in English, only the westernized version, with different names and locations.

With the release of the sequel of Cherry Tree High Comedy Club on Steam we finally get to play the game in English with the original names and the same places as in the Japanese version of the game.

For example, Miley turns into Mairu and Cindy suddenly is called Haru. Also, chilli dogs turn into rice omelets, because, you know, western people only know chilly dogs and can’t comprehend rice omelets or something.

All those extremely western sounding names feel a bit out of place, because everything feels so Japanese and all those cherry trees in the background for example definitely don’t make me feel like I’m in the US either.


I’m going to be completely honest with you: Cherry Tree High Comedy Club was the first visual novel I ever played, so I might judge this game a lot differently than some of you visual novel veterans out there but for someone new to this type of medium, this game was a really good entry point and even if you’re usually not a big fan of those type of games, you might still enjoy all those cute characters and the nice setting.

The multiple endings and the new game+ give the rather short game some replayability, since you will not be satisfied with only knowing the background story of for example 3 of the characters but you will want to know the background story of all of them, even though they might not be as interesting as you’d expect.

All in all, Cherry Tree High Comedy Club is a pretty decent visual novel for veterans and casuals in this medium. It might have its flaws but it is still a really enjoyable game to waste some time with.

If you’re a diehard action fan who needs explosions, headshots and a lot of gore to enjoy a video game, or someone who detests reading and dislikes games that heavily rely on text in general, you might want to sit this one out.

Everybody else:

Should you play Cherry Tree High Comedy Club?

Yes. Yes you should.